Cynicism and Hope

“Adopt a tragic view of history and don’t place your hopes in temporal power. You’ll experience fewer disappointments.” —my colleague Richard Kauffman, of the Christian Century, on the morning after the Scott Brown Senate victory in Massachusetts

This from my friend Dave Lowitzki, on the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts:

Too bad Scott Brown didn’t need to get 60% of the State of Massachusetts to decide that the State was allowed to vote on whether Scott Brown could become the next Senator of MA.

(Too busy to blog; not too busy to pass on what my friends are saying.)

. . . were recorded last July in my preface to Cynicism and Hope the book:

We hope, of course, that the 2008 election season brings about a restoration of what has been lost and the possibility of gaining what never was before, but a healthy cynicism tells us that even the best we can hope for from politics will not be enough. Whoever wins the presidency will be commander in chief of the most powerful killing machine in history; whoever prevails in the congressional elections will be bound by the necessities of politics. Elections are important, but their results are finite.

So what now? The preface continues:

The people who first heard the message of God’s kingdom and prayed for it to come on earth were living under the oppressive rule of an imperialistic power, but they would not realize God’s kingdom by taking up the sword or voting their oppressors out of office. Rather, they prayed and broke bread together; they shared their goods and loved their enemies and welcomed their neighbors who had been cast aside. They were a foretaste of the kingdom for which they hoped.